Esports

The Smash Ultimate Scene Squeezes In One Last Big Tournament Before 2019

It’s almost the last weekend of the year. There won’t be another one until 2019. Many of us are currently preparing to sleep 48 hours straight before ringing in the new year which, if modern trends are anything to go by, will be “quite something,” at least if my grandmother were the one saying it.…

Street Fighter V‘s Best Players Battle This Weekend For The Game’s Biggest Prize

The best Street Fighter V players in the world will face off in Las Vegas this weekend for the 2018 Capcom Cup, and after last year’s shocking finals, it’s anybody’s guess as to who will take away the trophy. Competitors qualify for the cup based on their performance in Capcom Pro Tour tournaments throughout the…

Europe’s Top Counter-Strike Team Eyes $1 Million Grand Slam Prize

Astralis have been on a roll lately. After starting out the year with an uncharacteristically disastrous performance at the ELEAGUE Boston Major in January, they rallied to take first-place at just over half of all tournaments they’ve competed in so far this year. Another win at this weekend’s ESL Pro League Finals would help them…

Overwatch League Season Two Will Have Some Road Games

One of the original appeals of the Overwatch League’s formula was the idea of teams traveling around the world to play in each others’ home cities, surrounded by whooping, hollering, body-paint-covered hometown crowds. But that didn’t happen during season one, and reports afterward alleged that it wouldn’t be a thing until 2020. Now, though, OWL…

After Dota 2 Team Fails To Ban One Of Its Players, Valve Does It For Them

Yesterday, professional Dota 2 player Carlo “Kuku” Palad was banned from a major tournament due to making what were seen as racist comments in a match last month. Prior to this move, Dota developer Valve had condemned Palad’s behavior but refused to inject itself directly into the matter, calling instead on teams to dole out…

A Team Who Has Barely Ever Played Rainbow Six Siege Made It Into The Latest Tournament

A group of students in Norway thought it would be funny to sign up to compete in Rainbow Six Siege, a game they’ve barely played, at one of the region’s biggest seasonal esports events, DreamHack Winter 2019. The stunt worked: Due to a shortage of signups for the event, Minigolfgutta (“mini golf boys”) will now…

Halo 5‘s Best Teams Go Head To Head In The Last Major Tournament Of The Year

It’s a busy weekend for esports. Recently with these posts I’ve been trying to focus in on an interesting aspect of just one particular competition happening in the days ahead, but this week, there are too many events to choose just one. Halo 5. Heard of it? The game came out back in 2015 but…

Toronto Esports Team Pulls Out Of Overwatch Because It Couldn’t Use ‘Toronto’ Anymore

There’s taking your ball and going home, and then there’s whatever Toronto Esports just did. After a few days of unusual tweets from the organization’s president and founder, including an unanswered challenge issued to Overwatch League’s new Toronto team, Toronto Esports suddenly dropped out of Overwatch’s minor league, Contenders, over a naming dispute. In a…

Valve Condemns Dota 2 Pros Making Racist Remarks But Calls On Teams To Regulate Themselves

Following a series of offensive remarks made by professional Dota 2 players recently, the game’s creator Valve has published a blog post condemning the behavior. In keeping with the company’s traditional approach of remaining mostly hands-off, however, it leaves the responsibility for sanctioning players strictly with teams, and didn’t offer any clear guidelines about how…

The Best Team In Rocket League Is On The Hunt For Another World Championship

Team Dignitas won Rocket League’s season five championship earlier this year. It was not easy, though, requiring a long run through the lower bracket that culminated in a back-to-back best-of-seven series against NRG Esports. Despite a nail-biter in the final match after NRG tied things up 3-3 with what some have called the best goal…

Eight Nations Face-Off In This Weekend’s Overwatch World Cup

In Overwatch, as in soccer, there’s annual league play and international World Cups. This weekend belongs to the second. Before OWL’s second season gets underway, teams from around the world will represent their nations at BlizzCon in the Overwatch World Cup. It’s one of the game’s most entertaining events for all the same reasons people…

One Of Dota 2’s Newest Teams Has A Lot To Prove This Weekend

In its first major tournament since the annual International in August, competitive Dota 2 returns this weekend with a $300,000 event in Hamburg, Germany. Though China’s Team Aster came out on top of the group stage with only one loss, it’s now hanging on for dear life in the lower bracket. The days and weeks…

Counter-Strike Pro Banned For Cheating, Now Regrets Ever Playing The Game

Nikhil ‘forsaken’ Kumawat is a professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player who was caught cheating at a tournament last weekend. In a video that went viral, he was seen trying to close an aim-assist program open on his computer mid-match Now banned for five years from any Esports Integrity Coalition-affiliated tournaments, Kumawat says he regrets ever…

16-Year-Old Dethrones Tetris World Champion With Difficult Hyper-Tap Technique

Over the weekend, seven-time winner Jonas Neubauer showed up at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Portland, Oregon like he has every year since it moved there in 2011. Instead of adding another championship to his name, he finished in second place this time, bested by 16-year-old Joseph Saelee who went on an amazing three-game…

League of Legends Coach Urges Underdog Teams To Play Their Own Style

The knockout stage of League of Legends’ biggest tournament of the year gets underway this weekend with only eight teams from across the globe left. One coach, whose team was recently sent packing after their loss earlier in the week, gave an impassioned speech to two of the remaining underdog European teams, encouraging them to…

Two Saiyans Descend on Hearthstone‘s Fall Championship

Autumn began almost a month ago, but the weather here in the Northeast was slow to catch up. Today it did, however, with a swampy 80 degrees giving way to leaf-rustling winds and low 60s, just in time for this weekend’s Hearthstone Fall Championship. The pull of Dragon Ball Z continues to bend the rest…

Madden Tournament Plans To Raise Money For Victims Of The Jacksonville Shooting

On August 26, a shooter at a Madden tournament in Jacksonville, Florida opened fire at the event, wounding 11 people and killing two, Taylor Robertson, 29, and Elijah Clayton, 22. This weekend, the organizers of Muthead, an independent Madden league, are holding a charity tournament to raise money for and honor the victims of the…

Inside Riot Games’ New League Of Legends Stadium In South Korea

This is LoL Park. Located in Seoul, it’s a brand new esports arena for Legend of Legends. It’s very cool, so let’s check it out. As Inven reports, LoL Park also has a Riot shop, a cafe, a 24-hour PC bang, a commemorative hall with the pro jersey and 3D printed figures of players, a…

Controversial Smash Player Banned From Several Events Under New Code Of Conduct

Ontario Super Smash Bros. Melee player Vikram “Nightmare” Singh has been banned from attending a number of Canadian tournaments after a friend described Singh’s alleged past sexual relationship with an underage girl and a supposed criminal charge that followed. The ban comes on the heels of several tournament organizers’ adoption of a Smash code of…

The Washington D.C. Overwatch League team just announced their new coach, Molly “AVALLA” Kim, former coach of Meta Bellum, an Overwtach Contenders team that made it into play-offs this year. She will be the first female coach in the league.